"It's shot and lit like a classic zombie film and,
in a certain way, this is a continuation of that...It'll
start within the horror genre and then immediately move
out of it into a kind of Art Deco, gangster genre."
"The five chapters of the story are about an organism
that is changing, and the system that changes that form
alters from chapter to chapter."
"There are characters, defined characters, that are
in conflict with one another over the state of that form."
“CREMASTER 3”—on
location at the Saratoga, NY racetrack
ART:21:
What role does this scene at
the Saratoga racetrack play in the overall story of "CREMASTER
3?"
BARNEY:
This is actually a really brief
cut away from the story that takes place in the Chrysler tower.
The scene it cuts away from describes a character who has
betrayed a labor union that he has a relationship to. In the
scene at Saratoga Springs, he's seen watching a harness race
and, as the horses come near, he sees that the horses are
running and are dead—it's a bit of a forecasting as to what
will become of him. It continues a type of scene that the
film starts with, where a character is shown digging herself
out of her grave. It's shot and lit like a classic zombie
film and, in a certain way, this is a continuation of that.
So the film will start in one way aesthetically,
and then switch gears about six minutes into it. It'll start
within the horror genre
and then immediately move out of it into a kind of Art Deco,
gangster genre.
ART:21:
How did you work with Gabe Bartolos
to realize the horror genre special effects with the horses?
BARNEY:
Well, in a certain way this was
easy. It was a very difficult thing for him to pull off, but
in terms of communication between the two of us this one was
easy, in that we were dealing with an understood anatomy.
We're talking about a dead horse and the questions were really
just about how long has the horse been dead and what environment
was it decaying in—kinds of questions that he's used to
asking. So, my preferences were with a more moist zombie rather
than a dry one, which would mean a moist environment and a
shorter amount of time that it had been there. So Gabe went
to a place that's an animal removal center; there are ranches
that are large enough to have livestock that would be dead
in the field, and an animal could go for weeks laying there
before it was found. This agency goes and removes that animal
and removes the bacteria-filled earth beneath it. He was able
to photograph a lot of different animals at different stages
of decay; it was an easy way to look through the video and
look through the still photographs and say "You know, this
looks like the carcasses in the meat packing district and
this doesn't—this looks rotten." We also looked at some
pathology books and examples of human cadavers that were telling
us the same kind of thing that we were interested in—a level
of decay that started to bring green into the red. I don't
know if you can see this, but this was a really good example
of the type of color that I wanted to work with—where you
have a memory of red, but it's being replaced by green and
gray. There's a level of moisture that Gabe was able to achieve
up at Saratoga with a lot of the gels that he uses.
ART:21:
How did you prepare to work with
the horses, especially since they're wearing such elaborate
costumes?
BARNEY:
The person who really ran the
shoot in Saratoga was the vet. He was the person who told
us when we had to stop and when we could continue shooting
again. And that sort of happens if we get into an effect or
an area that's a little esoteric—somebody tends to come
forward to sort of run the show, a specialist. That certainly
happened in Saratoga because these were full body suits that
the horses were wearing, and they were absorbent. They were
filling up with sweat and the horses were becoming fatigued
and overheated. So we would do two takes and the vet would
say, "That's it. They need to rest. The suits need to come
off," and that's what we would do. The same thing happened
with the bulls in "CREMASTER 2." It was basically
a single camera shoot but we needed to have multiple angles
of a bull bucking. So we did our best to find two bulls that
were identical so that we could work in the morning and work
in the evening on two different bulls, two different riders.
Bulls are just not used to bucking twice in one day. They'll
buck once; that's it. And so we were able to push the rider
and the animal as much as we could by shooting once a day
over the course of four days. We'd do a shot like this and
we'd get two production blocks out of having twin riders and
twin bulls. A vet kind of ran that shoot, too, and all the
animal handlers as well because animals, as anybody knows,
are difficult to work with. A little bit unpredictable, but
the challenge is nice.
ART:21:
Could you explain the significance
of this film in the "CREMASTER" series?
BARNEY:
Well, this is central. It's number
three in a series of five stories that, in a certain way,
meet in the middle. It's a cycle, in a sense, but the central
theme is shaping up to be a bit of a mirror—a two-sided
mirror that's sending the entire cycle into two elliptical
paths. So in that sense there's a character—the Chrysler
building—which is reflected by its architect, whose character
is functioning in the same way. I don't want to get too esoteric
on you here, but it's sort of in the fashion of Ayn Rand's
"The Fountainhead." The architect is guilty of hubris. He's
feeling that he can look out over the two halves of the story
(chapters one and two, then four and five) and resolve them.
ART:21:
How do the horses relate to this
tension?
BARNEY:
Well, the horses are meant to
foreshadow the fate of this betrayer. What he sees is a field
of ten horses in harnesses, running dead. It's the same way
that this zombie character in the beginning is a sort of resurrection
of the executed Gary Gilmore character from "CREMASTER
2."
ART:21:
Is it a dream or is he seeing
a strange reality?
BARNEY:
Well, I don't really look at
these films in the way that I sort of need to answer that
question. I mean they're not any more real than the character
is.
ART:21:
Numbers seem to be very significant
throughout the "CREMASTER" series. Why ten horses?
BARNEY:
There are five teams of two horses
and the five teams correspond to the five "CREMASTER"
episodes. This happens a couple of times in "CREMASTER
3," but the five projects are represented either quite
literally in the way that they are here, or symbolically
through species of flowers. That happens a couple of times,
where "CREMASTER 1" is represented by the orchid,
2 the glacier lily, 3 the narcissus, 4 the Irish gorse and
5 the calla lily. The silks of the riders carry the coat of
arms of each of the "CREMASTER" pieces, and this
race tells a particular story. The riders from "CREMASTER
5" have cut off the horses from "CREMASTER 1,"
are guilty of a foul, and are therefore disqualified. So "CREMASTER
1" bumps up into second place and there's a photo finish—a dead heat—between the two horses from "CREMASTER
3." It's a little story that takes place during the scene.
ART:21:
Why is "CREMASTER"
the title of these films?
BARNEY:
The cremaster are a set of muscles
that control the height of the internal reproductive system
in the male. I took that one as a title for a couple reasons,
primarily in that the story, over the course of five chapters,
has to do with a kind of system whose state is fluctuating,
not necessarily literally as a reproductive system, but as
a system whose identity is changing. Cremaster has been taken
on here as a kind of stand-in for conflict. The five chapters
of the story are about an organism that is changing, and the
system that changes that form
alters from chapter to chapter. In certain cases it's autonomic,
meaning that the cremaster muscle is part of the architecture
of the story and it doesn't really have an agency or character.
In other cases, there are characters, defined characters,
that are in conflict with one another over the state of that
form. So it is being used in a lot of different ways as an
idea. It's essentially about an imposed will onto the state
of the form, sometimes in a very abstract
way, sometimes in a more literal, biological way. But it's
basically a structural word. It's being used as a way to tell
the story, and not as a way to define a biological system
at all.
